I keep seeing mentions of reinclusion requests, but not a lot of specifics about if, when and how to do them. Plus, since it's usually mentioned in the Bourbon thread, the mentions get lost in a sea of posts. So can those in the know answer these questions:

1. If a formerly nicely ranking website now appears as: "Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.mysite.com" when you seach on its domain name, should I ask for reinclusion? (The site is totally innocent - for those who saw some of my posts in the Bourbon thread, its the site about my cat - nothing sleazy or black hat about it whatsoever! Black hat... she's not even a black cat!)

2. If my website got way trashed by Bourbon (like, Google traffic down 90%) but is still in the SERPs, should I send in a reinclusion request? (This is about my other, much larger site.)

3. Does reinclusion mean just for the homepage URL or every page that I think got trashed? (I hope this isn't the latter - we're talking nearly 1,000 pages over several sites!)

4. How do I send a reinclusion request to Google?

5. What do I say to them?

That's what I'd like to know. Anyone else can add pertinent questions too. Hopefully some of you will have pertinent answers! :-)

An update on my banned domain. For at least the past 2 weeks, Google was displaying the following when searching for my domain.

-------------- Sorry, no information is available for the URL example.com

If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link: example.com Find web pages from the site example.com Find web pages that contain the term "example.com" --------------

However, now it displays:

-------------- Sorry, no information is available for the URL example.com

Find web pages from the site example.com Find web pages that contain the term "example.com" --------------

I wonder if this means that they reviewed my site and decided to keep it banned, or if they just changed the way they display banned sites? The change happened within the last 24 hours, during that time "Mediapartners-Google/2.1" visited the main parts of the site but none of the real content. It's also kind of odd because I thought that bot was only used when you have Adwords on your site, however I don't have any forms of Google advertising? Thoughts?

nutsandbolts - While I've heard of cases where reinclusion requests do work, I am starting to agree with you in thinking that my site won't be back into the index. I was looking through my access logs and I've noticed Googlebot has stopped coming to my website completely. It used to visit my site daily, now I haven't seen it crawl any of my pages in over a week. This excludes crawls from Googlebot-Image, which last visited my site on Jul 6th. What sucks is that this domain is actually my brand name. I am thinking about maybe just moving to the .net domain of it instead and 301'ing all traffic from .com to .net. Oh, and I emailed Google again to ask for status and I'll let you know what reply I get.

Yes I have (unfortunately). The site is completely gone from Google and it went from PR4 to PR0 a little over a month ago. I emailed Google about it and after going back and forth, they said they'd fwd it to their engineers. When going back and forth with them via email, Googlebot was still coming along. However, it stopped completely recently which has me worried. I emailed Google again to see where the site is in the reinclusion process and hopefully they will respond and let me know what's up. I'll keep people informed and probably end up throwing up a webpage on the experience with detailed info, as I am having a hard time finding good details of other cases where a site has been banned and then reincluded.

Timeline: April 23rd: Dropped from Google. May 24th: Submitted re-inclusion request. May 24th: The usual automated response received. May 26th: Responded to automated response. June 13th: Received email telling me the request was sent to the engineering team for investigation. June 16th: Back in Google!

That message is in a private forum. Is there any way you can explain here what happened that your site was removed in the first place?

In my case, my site has been gone since January - and I had on two occasions gotten a response that my request was being forwarded to engineering - but that was months ago. I am not-so-patiently awaiting the 6 month mark to see if it will be coming back then, but my guess is it might be gone for good.

I have site that has been dropped from google in the last week. What seems unusual is that it is only the homepage getting "sorry no information available for www.web-conferencing-central.com"

The site had paid links from some small directories (I am wondering if this is a real no-no). It also has links from a few sites that I own, but without duplicate content. Aside from those practices, I dont see what could have cause us to get banned.

Has anyone else seen their homepage dropped while internal pages stay in the index, or is this typical?

Hey guys, anyone got any updates on their attempts to get re-included in Google yet?

All my pages appear to have recovered now - my reviews site came back just before I left for a month in Mongolia, and my personal site was back when I came home. (I'm back on "first name" terms with Google :-) )

I made one change (blocking Googlebot from my AdSense alternate ads, which use links to Amazon) but I don't know if that helped. A fellow member here reports mentioning my site to someone from Google at the Google Engineers session of the conference and being told it was recognised as a "collateral damage" problem, but without details. So I'm just hoping it stays fixed!

Sent two emails using the webmaster@google.com address and they replied back telling me to use their form in their page. I've done that now. I guess too many people were sending them private emails so they must have discontinued that.

I filed a reinclusion request on a site that had a white PR toolbar for probably a year, got the acknowledgement of having sent it in, heard not another word, but roughly 2 months later, the site is back with PR4 and ranks decently now in the SERPS. Whatever that means. I assume the site was examined and reincluded but I have no message from Google to that effect.

Hey guys this is an update for anyone who might be following this thread. I got a reply back from Google that said they're sending my request for re-inclusion to their engineers. They even addressed the email to me, personally, so I think it was an actual person, and not a canned response. (Actually, the first two I sent got back two canned responses that told me to take a look at this or that at their site, guidelines, etc.)

So I am very optimistic now that Google will let me back in once they take a look at my explanations about my pages being hijacked. It might take a while, but if an actual engineer looks at the situation, I'm sure he'll be able to see, quite easily, that I shouldn't have been penalized. I think it really is that simple of a problem, and I'm a total noob to the net!

If anyone wants, I'll update this thread if anything happens from this.

I've just noticed one of my sites completly missing from Google today and am at a total loss to explain why :( Researching webmasterworld on what to do and it looks like this thread has some decent tips and results, can someone please post or sticky me the link to the Google reinclusion form?

A search on my domain comes back: "Sorry, no information is available for the URL" without the usual "if this is a valid domain click here..."

I'll give it a few days and hope things go back to normal else looks like I'll be contacting Google as well.

Just got banned this morning. It's a popular web directory that delivers directory feeds to other websites, I use one for these feeds on another websites, one of these websites got banned also while the others remain intact. This has happened 6 hours ago, you cant imagine how I do feel right now, in a word TERRIFIED. Yes I still got traffic from other searching engines (around %30 of my normal traffic) but..

I suspected getting banned for a duplicated content. Just contacted google an hour ago and got the automatice response in which I reponded to. Waiting for the human response now.

I had this incident before but it was removing my index page only, not my 300.000 chached results in google. When I contacted them, and they forward it to a google engineer, my index got back in days. But the situation here is totally different. It's a total ban (no single page in index, PR dropped to 0, etc..).

Weird thing is that when I search for "www.domain.com/folder/folder/", yes I see no results from my domain but it shows "Results 1 - 4 of about 345,000". That makes me think that my site still in index, but for some reason it got filtered or something like this.

That's it. Look like a filter kicking our directories. Form Google standpoint this could be smart way to go, but not after it showed itself that having directory is OK (Google Dir), and not after people spent years watching their sites raising spot by spot in Google serps, adding new topic-wise links to their directories, etc. AT LEAST they could think a bit before using hard-power. AT LEAST they could look at the sites personally, not with a filter :)

Just banned last night, went from 5000 visitors/day from Google to zero in one day. Out Of the index completely, my domain returns only mentions of my site, not the site itself. Went from PR5 to gray. No clue, no SEO just the same content I've used for four years at PR5. I am devastated, my income is nearly gone...

"Just banned last night, went from 5000 visitors/day from Google to zero in one day. Out Of the index completely, my domain returns only mentions of my site, not the site itself. Went from PR5 to gray. No clue, no SEO just the same content I've used for four years at PR5. I am devastated, my income is nearly gone... "

Same thing happened here. For 4 years in top 10 for all keywords. Now no ranking, no cache, no backlinks; just gone. This is not a dirctory. This is a site with articles written every day about a specific topic. And it has been in DMOZ for 4 years!

100,000 page views down to about 5,000 (estimate for today) here. The site is mostly unique content that myself and other reviewers have written, with a directory based on relevent computing links as part of the site. Feels like 5 years of hard work has gone to waste, as no-one will be able to find new articles apart from repeat visitors and ones from other search engines (which isn't many!).

Yes I think it's a directory thing. Google has nuked another website powered by my first large web directory. I suspected duplicated content, being accused of buying/selling links based on PageRank, but I have never suspected that it bans website for being a directory. Still I ensure it's a ban, not a filter. Yes, it shows "results 1-4 from 300.000" but that does not explain the PR0 that hit not only my www directory but all subdomains as well.

"Yes, it shows "results 1-4 from 300.000" but that does not explain the PR0 that hit not only my www directory but all subdomains as well"

This is the exact same behaviour I experienced when my site was banned. You might even see your site reappear for a brief moment later today or tomorrow... mine did. However, within 36 hours of the ban there was no trace of my site anywhere.

The good news is that Google is responding to re-inclusion requests. As long as your site is innocent, you should get back in within a month.